Stories

This weekend, Jeff Casimir of Jumpstart Lab presented at RubyConf 2009 about Ruby Processing. He did a great job showing us all how to use the library and even created a really nice handout for the audience. So, if you'd like great training in Ruby or Rails for your organization, check out Jumpstart Lab for more information.

We ran into Nick Quaranto at RubyConf who was giving a talk on the current state of Gemcutter.org. Gemcutter is moving to rubygems.org and replacing gems.rubyforge.org as the new standard, community-supported gem host.

Ruby Hero Bryan Helmkamp gave us the opportunity to talk with him a bit about arel, a relational algebra library for Ruby. In case you hadn't heard, arel will soon be a requirement to run Rails 3. Ultimately, arel simplifies the ActiveRecord implementation by making SQL queries a class rather than a bunch of concatenated strings.

Ilya Grigorik put together a great talk (and supporting blog posts) about the current state of Ruby Virtual Machines (VMs). He's gone around to all of the major developers and contributors and compiled a summary of where things are at for each platform and what's to be expected in the near future. You should take a look as there are a lot of major updates to come, with MacRuby, Maglev, IronRuby, and Rubinious all slated to hit 1.0 in the coming year.

As part of GitHubs migration to Rackspace, they took the opportunity to split their single, large, shared, file store into multiple individual file systems spread across physical servers. To accomplish the high-speed data access and control, BERT, BERT-RPC, and Ernie were created to provide a highly scalable Ruby RPC. Think: Better distributed Ruby. So, we caught up with Tom and asked him about it.

Previous Episodes

This week we look at a new authorization plugin from Ryan Bates, and the latest releases of MacRuby and YARD. Also ruby-gmail, the SimpleDB DataMapper adapter, and using mod_rewrite to serve maintenance pages.

There are several new screencasts being produced targeting the Ruby and IT community worth checking out. In addition, JetBrains, DocumentCloud, and others are still hard at work making your Ruby life easier.

If you are a Windows-running Rubyist, you are going to want to check out the new Ruby Installer. Munin monitoring, Pubsub reading and Hashie objects are also covered. Oh, and spam, spam, spam, spam-blocking with Defender.

Heard of Redis? In this episode we cover how you can use it in your application and how GitHub uses it for Resque. Heroku Asset Packager, mail_safe, and JSBlogger are also covered, along with why you should use conditionals rather than exceptions.